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I was barely conscious as she helped me sink back against my pillows and tumble into the dark.
* * *
“You have visitors,”Flora said brightly a couple of days later. It was difficult for me to keep track of the days because there was no window in my room. There was a curtain. It was a thick, floral thing that hung from the ceiling and almost hit the floor, but it opened to a mirrored glass window that reflected my own face.
It was for my own safety, Flora had said. So I didn’t fall out or try to end the confusion of my post coma haze by throwing myself from the ledge.
Suicide was apparently a side effect of massive brain trauma. You learn something new every day.
Or several somethings, like the fact that my parents were coming to see me.
Only I didn’t have parents.
At least, I didn’t think I did. Somewhere in the cellar of my hazy head, there was a memory of losing them early. The shock of trauma and the long road through grief. But Flora reassured me that was simply the plotline of a popular movie that I’d seen the night before the accident.
“Are they here?” I asked, sitting up. I could sit up by myself now, so that was a bonus.
“They are,” Flora said brightly. “They’ve been very eager to see you. They’ve been extremely concerned, you know. That’s why they are paying for this top-notch care and making sure I’m here for you twenty-four seven.”
I had noticed Flora never seemed to sleep. I hadn’t asked her if she had a life away from this hospital and me simply because I didn’t want to break the spell. I felt as if she was my only support in the world, and if I reminded her that she was supposed to be somewhere else, she would abandon me.
And the dark kept tugging at me, pulling me with seductive whispers that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I didn’t belong.
“I can’t wait to meet them,” I said, and for a moment, I saw Flora’s face darken with disapproval. “I meanto seethem. But, of course, I’ve already met them. They’re my parents.”
I laughed it off, but it felt fake. Disingenuous. I didn’t think I was a fake girl outside of these four walls.
“Where is she?” I heard the woman’s voice before I saw her face. She was loud, demanding, and had that haughty edge like a razor as if her words could slice you in half because she was a woman who got what she wanted at all times.
I heard him, too. Soothing but slick. There was somethingoffabout him.
“There, there, dear,” he said. “Don’t harangue these poor nurses. They’re so overwrought with the job they’ve been given already.”
“Down here,” Flora called out brightly.
And two figures filled my doorway, my parents, I was told.
But the moment I saw their faces, everything shattered, and everything was wrong again.
They were not my parents. They looked like my parents, older than I remember because my parents had died years before. These people were clones, but poorly done clones. Their faces were twisted in cruel smirks, and their clothes were much too expensive and much too perfect.
These were not my parents, everything was wrong, and nothing felt like I belonged.
I would have done anything to get back down into the dark.
CHAPTER2
“It’san exciting day for you, dear,” Mother said as we drove up the long, winding road to the Academy. I was excited, at least. I couldn’t wait to get away from the two of them and all their wrongness.
Every morning I woke in a beautiful, luxurious bedroom filled with expensive things. Every morning I had to remember all over again who I was.
It was exhausting, and the doctors thought I might never become whole again. The thought terrified me. I didn’t know if I was more afraid of losing my secret rebellious side or scared of becoming the dull, robotic girl I seemed to have been.
Was it worse to lose what I’d once had or to gain what I’d once been?
“It really is,” I replied and folded my hands on my lap. I was wearing white silk gloves that were impossibly soft. Mother had insisted on them, and I hadn’t had the energy to argue.
I thought they were fucking stupid. Of course, I thought most things they expected of me were fucking stupid, but apparently, I had been the kind of girl who hadn’t minded.
